Tumblr Releases New Archives Page Layout

Tumblr’s Jacob Bijani announced some exciting (or not?) new updates to the tumblr archives page today. As we all know, the Archives section of all tumblogs is currently under full control of tumblr.com and it’s staff, and as such cannot be customized in the tumblr theme code.

While this lets the tumblr staff developers experiment with, and update the archives section of tumblr blogs at will, it also frustrates other tumblr theme developers because they cannot control that one section of tumblr theme development (more on this later).

Anyways, earlier, the archives page looked like this.

Now, with the new updates, the archives page looks like this.

I must say I am sort of torn between the two layouts. Let me explain.

I liked the old archives page listing because it fitted well with the way my Years Of Guilt blog functioned – a single photo a day, nothing else. No quote posts, no text posts, no chat posts, no nothing. So having the ability forced feature of listing monthly archive links at the top, and then the current month’s post links as thumbnails, was simple and clean. However, I was not a big fan of the post title appearing inside the thumbnail in the old archives page.

The new archives page does away with listing titles inside the thumbnails, so you can see the photo thumbnails more clearly, without any text obstruction. That said, I am quite upset that

1. the monthly links are not very prominent, and have to be clicked down from the drop down on the far right. and
2. all archive thumbnails of your blog load simultaneously, causing something like the following to happen (ugly image loading screen with broken thumbnails slowly loading) even in a high speed internet connection.

Now I realize that tumblr uses the Amazon’s Cloud to host their images. They are also likely caching the archive page at first load. Still, to use Jacob’s quote against him -

your posts continuously flow down the page, all the way back to the beginning of your blog.

is really an un-necessary “feature”.